CHAPTER 460: PART: 460 MOSQUITOES AND ONE PROMISE PART TWO

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Kai turned to meet him, and the man realized how very small a fact a man can be when a force decides he is not relevant.

The first blade skittered off Adaptive Armor with a sound like a bird breaking its beak on a window. The second darted for the slit at Kai’s hip. Kai turned his own hip into it and let the plate meet steel with the grinding intimacy of stone and plow.

The assassin adjusted without thinking —good instincts— but Kai did not, because he did not have to. He caught both wrists, pressed the blades back into the man’s chest as if handing them home, and kept pressing until the chest learned a new size. He laid him down. He did not speak. He saved words for when they could make shape, not just sound.

Two more tried to be stories right after.

The first was a jumper, a man who liked to be air and not ground, who had learned to write gravity’s rules on his own skin. He came down from a branch with the kind of cut that begins at the shoulder and ends at regret. Kai stepped into his fall and stole it, one arm punching into the man’s center like a post going into soft earth, the other yanking the ankle sideways with a pop that drew a sharp ah from three people who had, until that moment, considered themselves too tough to make such a sound. The man hit the ground and discovered earth is less forgiving when you have insulted it in public.

The second tried Thea.

He came in low, not for her throat but for the knee. Thea had seen that trick when she was ten and bored. She offered him a clean knee and then took it away a thumb-width at the last instant and let his blade meet empty air and the back of her own hilt, which had been waiting like a friend behind a door. She cracked his wrist. He snarled —seven-star men should stop doing that; it only makes the ending come sooner— and tried for her face with the other hand. She bit the knuckle with her hilt again and then would have finished it if she had not made the mistake of glancing up in the exact second when Kai decided to be the thing in her sky.

Because she looked then.

Because the face above her was a man’s and a weapon’s and something that had the indecency to be beautiful while it was busy reminding the world of rules. Because for a beat in which she did not like herself very much, she felt heat in her face that had nothing to do with exertion.

"You—" she said, and the body at her feet took that moment to try to stand again and she had to finish teaching him manners instead of pursuing the thought.

Mia didn’t pursue any thought except stay where he says

and don’t blink when the dangerous parts of the air move.

She watched him work. She had seen him fight before. She had seen him learn not to enjoy it and then choose to be good at it anyway because sometimes not enjoying a thing is a luxury you give away to keep other people’s hearts indistinguishable from their bodies. But she had never seen this — this easy inevitability. This refusal to be hurried. This refusal to be cruel when cruelty would have been faster but would also have made the mountain feel a little less like a place you want children to grow up in.

He did not preen. He did not pose. He got men out of his house.

One of the assassins realized what was happening sooner than the rest. He had been in armies long enough to feel when a line stops being a line and starts becoming a shape that will not break. He backed up into the shadow under a scrub, tried to become irrelevant, and put two fingers to the whistle sewn into his cuff.

Kai turned his head a fraction. The whistle had not blown. He saw the thought leave the man’s face before the breath left his lungs.

"Don’t," Kai said.

The assassin looked at him for the first time as if he might be a person and not a problem. He let his hand fall from the whistle and set his feet instead. For that, Kai gave him a faster ending. It is a kind of mercy not all soldiers understand, and that is probably good.

The press thinned. Numbers stayed the same for a minute because fresh bodies from the shadows tried to replace the ones the mountain was refusing to give back. Then the math acknowledged itself. Seven-star skill cannot write forever against a slate that refuses to crack. The mountain did not crack tonight.

Yavri’s line advanced without a cheer. Shadeclaw’s drones tightened the jaw. Silvershadow’s second ring moved forward three steps as one, stopped, and didn’t lose their breath. That is harder than it sounds. Men who are tired want to stop to rest. Men who are winning want to stop to admire winning. He let them do neither and his people loved him more for it later and hated him exactly as much as was useful now.

In the middle of all of it, one assassin who had marked Mia from the start for no better reason than that she was important and he liked making important things end, took his last chance. He slid through ankles, under arms, brought his blade up in a cut he had practiced for twenty years because sometimes simple is the thing you do perfectly and that is enough, and aimed for the seam between her ribs where stories end.

Kai put his hand there instead. The blade stopped a finger from Mia’s skin. The point trembled. The assassin felt his arm did not belong to him anymore and looked up to ask why. Kai’s eyes had no questions for him. Kai’s hand closed. The knife became not a knife. The man became a problem the ground solved.

Mia’s chest moved against Kai’s palm.

"Hi," she said, because sometimes all the things you want to say and all the days you have saved them up for step on each other’s feet and what comes out is a word a child would use and it is better than silence anyway.

"Hi," he said, and for a heartbeat they grinned at each other like thieves.

"Focus!" Thea barked at herself, at the air, at the part of her brain that had just decided to set up a small table with a little vase and admire a man while knives were still making introductions. She finished the man at her feet with a briskness that would have been funny if anyone had the leisure, glanced over at Mia, and then saw Vexor and Needle.... total four other faces than Kia she had assumed were ghosts.

Her mouth hardened. The bile rose so fast it surprised even her.

"Why," Thea said, each syllable so sharp it could shave, "are Vexor and the others alive?"

No one had time to answer. That was cruel, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. The question was not for this second. It was for the night that would come after this one if everyone was lucky enough to earn it.

Kai heard her anyway.

He turned. For the first time since he had stood, he let his gaze settle on Thea.

Disgust touched his face like a shadow of a cloud of water.

"What," he asked, not loudly, not for drama, just because he is the kind of man who asks questions that are pointed at the center and do not blur on the edges, "are you doing here?"

Thea’s chin came up because her chin has never done anything else when accused of anything, including breathing. "Saving your princess," she snapped. "Who else is going to keep her neck attached while she tries to prove a point?"

"Princess Mia," he repeated, and the word did something odd in his mouth, like a coin he hadn’t realized he knew the taste of. He shook his head once, because none of that belonged to this moment. "You’ve done enough," he said. "Stay where you are useful. That is not near me."

Only three men in Thea’s life had told her to stay anywhere and kept their bones while she considered their advice. Two were far away for years. The third is her mother. She threw back a retort that would have become an argument in a court, realized he was already gone — stepping into another knot of knives as if God had drawn a straight line through the mess and invited him to walk it — and swallowed what she’d wanted to say because a part of her that she would deny later agreed with him.

"Fine," she said to no one, to everyone, to Mia who was still alive and infuriatingly, bewilderingly tender-eyed, "I’ll stay where I am useful. It’s not becauseyou are handsome." She murmured the last line softly.

She set her shoulders and began to make that sentence true.

The last of the assassins realized they were the last.

Last men are a particular kind of brave. Sometimes they are also a particular kind of stupid. Tonight they were only the first. They tried a rush not because it would work but because bodies prefer doing to thinking when the end is near. It gave Yavri a clean angle she had been building for the last two minutes. She took it without smiling.

"Advance," she said, and her wedge stepped forward and did not stop. The ring closed.